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Raising Farm Prices & Finding Financial Freedom
817 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we sit down with Jessica Evans of Evans Family Farm from North Carolina. As one of Barn2Door Farm Advisors, Jessica shares her tips for pricing and packaging, why Farmers shouldn't be afraid to charge a premium for their products, and why financial health is key to a successful Farm business.
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Transcript
Introduction to Direct Farm Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the go to resource for farms across the US looking to grow and manage their business. Tune in weekly to hear tips and tactics from our most successful farmers on how to increase sales, access more customers and save time and money. We'll also speak with industry experts, business leaders and partners to share the latest farm business trends selling direct to market.
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to the direct farm podcast. I'm Rachel, your host for today's
Chat with Jessica Evans
00:00:31
Speaker
episode. We've got a great conversation for you today with one of our farm advisors, Jessica Evans from Evans family farm. Welcome Jessica. Thanks for having me on. So it's actually been a long time since we've had you on the direct farm podcast.
Starting Evans Family Farm
00:00:45
Speaker
And so to get started, can you tell us a little bit about your farm and how you started over in North Carolina? Sure. So we are in central North Carolina, we're a pasture based livestock
00:00:55
Speaker
farm. We raise meat for direct sales and we've been doing that since 2016, which is when we started our farm. Neither of my husband and I have a background in agriculture at all. It was just sprouted from a passion of healthy food and healthy environment and then maybe we'll raise a little bit more to offset the cost of raising our own and it just glowed from there and so now we manage 110 acres here in central North Carolina.
00:01:17
Speaker
That's amazing. And you guys started over in California, right? And then migrated to North Carolina. Yeah, we have your backyard homestead in Southern California, where we're from originally, which was about two acres, which in Southern California is a lot of land. It sounds like nothing in comparison to what we have now. We just have to raise food for ourselves. And yeah, that's where we started some of our enterprises.
00:01:38
Speaker
So it seems obviously it's changed a lot over the last couple of years.
Challenges in Expansion
00:01:42
Speaker
Can you really dive into the details since you've gone full-time farming and really have expanded what that's been like and maybe some of the challenges you guys have faced?
00:01:50
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So there's definitely challenges with growth. We started on 10 acres and that was more than enough to start with. And as we added enterprise and as we scaled up those various enterprises, we were just in need of more space, especially if we, we would call ourselves a regenerative farm. So that means you can't overuse your land. So if we stock too many animals on it or has too much disturbance, we're not really living up to one of those mission.
00:02:15
Speaker
so we were leasing land on different farms. One set of animals here, a set of animals there and it was it you got to do what you got to do sometimes and then the horseshoe of land around us that used to be all part of one contiguous farm became available and we'd have our eyes on it forever because it was beautiful land we loved it it's adjoining land so as far as management is way easier and that had its own challenges and buying land is a
00:02:40
Speaker
It's not a small endeavor. It took time and there's challenges in getting financing for farmland and interest rates and all kinds of things like that. We actually use some of the USDA programs. So if anybody listening has questions about using those new and beginning farmer programs, you can reach out to me. That's a whole nother conversation. It's a process, but it's worth it in my opinion.
00:02:59
Speaker
No, that's really good to hear. I know we had a lot of questions regarding how to go about purchasing land or should I lease? Should I purchase? Not to jump too far down the rabbit hole, but what went into your decision to deciding to purchase over a lease? Leasing this land wasn't an option, so. Okay.
00:03:14
Speaker
The owner wanted to sell it. He did not want to lease. He made it very clear. But he also worked with us. Some of this land is owner financed because we really were the ideal buyer for this land. And so we worked different equations. It really was a numbers game. I sat down with my accounting and ran my numbers and what are my payments going to be? What is that going to cost me? What are we making? What does this land let us scale up in profitability? Can it pay for itself basically was the biggest question. And is it a good investment? I would say,
00:03:43
Speaker
especially in this current climate, land is always a good investment, but they're not making more of it. So the communities in the US are growing and land is becoming harder and harder to find. So it felt like it was a good investment. So even if heaven forbid, you know, that we had shut down the farm for whatever reason, does this land still have value to us? So all those things we considered.
00:04:00
Speaker
No, that's really good to hear.
Transition to Online Sales
00:04:02
Speaker
And then in what point in your decision were you guys selling direct to market the entire time when you had the 10 acres or when did you make that decision to go direct to market or at least to get your business online and sell online?
00:04:13
Speaker
Yeah, we'd always been direct to market. And so we were doing that just farmers markets and word of mouth for probably the first year or so. And then we definitely just saw, that was 2017, 2018, huge pivots to a lot of online sales websites. And we saw it was a necessity. Like we need an online presence. We need an online store more than just our social media for marketing. And so I was starting to research, okay, how do I build an online store? All these different platforms that you can finagle yourself. And none of it was really meant
00:04:43
Speaker
for farmers. So it was always like having to do all these weird workarounds and happen to meet some of your founders at a conference when they were the ones running the booth. So we go way back. And I was like, perfect. That's exactly what I'm looking for. The best use of my time isn't learning how to build a webpage to meet my needs. So let's go. So it's worked hand in hand that way.
00:05:02
Speaker
I know I love to hear that, especially over the last couple of years, there has been obviously a huge shift to, to go online. But like you said, finding that, that tool that's specifically built for farmers needs. Cause I think there was a quote from another one of our farmer advisors. He was like, I don't know how to build a website, but I know how to raise my chickens and grow the food and everything else. And so that's, that's huge. And it probably saves you a whole bunch of time. Yeah. I mean, it would take me eight hours to do. It takes me five minutes on the right form. And I'm sure you don't have that kind of time to spare.
00:05:32
Speaker
Ain't nobody got time for that. So something that we really wanted to discuss with you today and something that I think a lot of farmers have a hard time deciding is the prices of their products.
Product Pricing Strategy
00:05:42
Speaker
And so I would love to hear when you first started farming, how did you go about determining your prices and how has this evolved and changed over time?
00:05:51
Speaker
Absolutely. I think when we first started, which I think is probably where every farm starts, you look around you like what's farmer Joe down the street selling chicken for and what's before going here. And I don't know, I have to be in that ballpark if I want to sell anything. And I think as we've grown and evolved and learned every year, I try and take some kind of online course or conference or professional development in that field.
00:06:12
Speaker
field, whether it's technical stuff in the field or if it's marketing and business stuff, and definitely learned that like my price point is my price point. Like it has to cover my expenses. And as soon as you stop, I think in farming, especially because we're producing somebody's food and competing with the grocery store. Sometimes we feel like we're competing with the grocery store, which we really were not. Like it's apples and oranges.
00:06:32
Speaker
And I need to be unapologetic about needing to make a living. And I'm not trying to price gouge anybody, simply trying to get paid for what I do. And no other profession feels guilty about that. I feel like farming and teaching, which I was a former teacher, so maybe that's where it comes from. It's like deep seated, right? To not get paid for how much you work.
00:06:50
Speaker
So just learning, having to have a good grasp on my numbers. I think that's also part of this discussion, which takes time. And I would say sit down from the very, very beginning. In North Carolina, we have a farm school for people interested in getting into the business of farming for people that don't want to jump right in there. But one of those courses is business.
00:07:09
Speaker
Somehow through networking, I had met the guy who teaches that business section and we were able to trade kind of data for the spreadsheets and he wants to know if his spreadsheets work. Do they work in a real world environment? So we'll sit down and put my numbers in there and figure out what are we thinking of? What are we not thinking about? What are we not taking into account? And I use this constantly when I'm playing around with something. So playing around with like feed prices this year. Okay. How much are they going up? How much does that change my pricing?
00:07:36
Speaker
And to be able to have a spreadsheet, I can plug those numbers in and see what my cost is. So I generally, as a rule of thumb, like to 2x my cost. If it costs me $3 to...
00:07:47
Speaker
grow a chicken, I want to price that at $6 for that chicken per pound. Not the whole chicken. I'm not Walmart. Exactly. And you make a really good point when it comes to, so you're looking at your input costs and you're seeing how you can, you're double your profit off of what your costs are. But you also touched on a good point really quickly that I want to cover is with inflation and increased feed costs and some of those input costs I've imagined have been going up with the recent climate.
00:08:11
Speaker
So how have you been accounting for that and raising your prices or have you been raising your prices to account for those costs? We did. So we did raise our price on everything but poultry, honestly, by about 10%. Now poultry is tricky for anyone listening who does pastured poultry. You are.
00:08:29
Speaker
It's the public perception that chicken is the cheat meat. Now granted, I think our product is completely different. The science would back up our product is completely different than what you buy at the grocery store, but you're still dealing with a customer's perception. And so we were able to scale a few things.
00:08:43
Speaker
on our poultry side that let us get our costs lower because that's one way to make more money isn't always to make more sales, but how do I lower my cost? And so we were able to compensate for that by scaling things in a certain way. Like economy is the scale. It was, we started doing bigger batches on our processing days. So we're dividing that processing labor by a larger amount of birds and things like that.
00:09:04
Speaker
So storage, pricing our bags that we vacuum seal and pricing our stickers differently, doing a couple value ads on items that weren't selling that we could price up. So we did raise on a couple things like boneless canvas for us. We could sell that all day. I probably could charge $25 a pound, but I don't need to. That one went up. It usually goes up about a dollar a pound per year just to stay current in the market. But everything else, we went up across the board about 10 to 15% on all our cuts of pork, beef,
00:09:28
Speaker
And then turkeys for like holiday turkeys, those went up too, because that was just the cost where we couldn't, there weren't enough wiggle room to eat that cost. And then how does like your branding and how you communicate the quality of your products, you use that at all in order to communicate to your customers of why you're raising prices or how does that play a role?
00:09:46
Speaker
We did a general email beginning of the year, just saying, Hey, just know a couple of things may be going up. I don't know if I did. I think I thought about that. And I think just reading the current climate, it was just expected. Everything was going up and prices changed. And then spring, our market, our in face market starts out again.
00:10:04
Speaker
People just kind of expected it. Like we just didn't really get a lot of pushback because everybody was experiencing that. Grocery store prices are up, gas prices are up. And then just if we did ever get a customer questioning, oh, this used to be this much and expenses are up, fuels up, feeds up. And it's nothing they haven't heard before. So it was never really any pushback. Now there was like a kind of an influx in.
00:10:25
Speaker
Anybody who sells meat direct knows how easy it was to do in 2020 and 2021 and 2022, it's gotten a little back to challenging that customer retention has been the goal rather than necessarily like getting more customers. So the people that tried it and then went back to grocery store stuff, we're trying to keep them back along our side of things, I guess I would say.
Subscription Program for Retention
00:10:45
Speaker
That makes sense. Do you use subscriptions to help with customer retention?
00:10:48
Speaker
We do our subscription program. I love it. So I wouldn't change it for the world and it's flexible too. So again, we understand the current climate for other people as well. So we let people, there's no commitment is what we do. You can cancel it. You can pause anytime, which I think people appreciate and take it personally when they do. And most of the time they're like, Hey, I got too much in my freezer. Hey, we can't afford it right now. I've gotten those emails throughout this year and that's totally fine. Hey, I understand. No problem. You know, I can cancel it for you or here's the easy way to do it.
00:11:16
Speaker
jump back on whenever you're ready kind of thing. People appreciate that too. So I think that is also good customer relations like being understanding and nobody's bound into this where they feel like they gotta keep getting them, but we do keep marketing them for sure. And people love it. I have people that have been doing some of the commercial, not to name names, the commercial subscription boxes that are
00:11:34
Speaker
Very ambiguous about their sourcing of meat and pricing in general. They have a flat price, but you're not getting, you don't know per pound price. You don't know where that animal came from and just educating our customers. Hey, here's exactly where it comes from. Here's about what you've got. You can opt out of a certain kind of meat. We let a couple customers flip-flop things if they ever need to, but yeah, it's a guaranteed sell.
00:11:55
Speaker
and I value those customers. So I think that's been a big thing in retaining our subscription customers. I want to keep those subscription customers because that's a guarantee. No work on my part every single month. They get $100 to $200 worth of meat. And so when we get like the prime cuts back and we get ribeyes back or fillets or something we've been out of stock on, they get it first. They want to feel special and valuable. So we definitely want to honor that.
00:12:18
Speaker
Yeah, you touched on a good point. And Barnstarr actually just wrote a blog on that topic of how local farms can compete with some of those big meat box delivery and subscription programs. And I think you touched on a really good point of that. Local farms can compete because of customer relations, convenience of subscriptions. And I know you Evans Farm does delivery too. And so finding those unique nuances of how you can
00:12:42
Speaker
offer high quality products, transparency, everything else in the same convenient formats. That's, I'm sure that's been huge for you guys too. Yeah. Yeah. Convenience is still key. As much as our customers may value what we sell, they still want it to show up magically on their doorstep. They don't want to go anywhere. They don't want to do anything. So they still want that same experience while getting what we would push as a higher value product. And I'm sure they're more than willing to switch over to you guys after being with another subscription box company, after understanding how much better your products are.
00:13:11
Speaker
Yeah. We had a couple of converts this weekend. We had a big, our big fall, like on-farm event. So farm tours and food and kind of a grand opening for our store. And we had a couple of customers be like, yeah, I've been getting, not to name names, but commercial subscription box. But like, but now I see like I've seen your animals. I've set foot on here. I want to switch over. What can I do? That's so great. I love to hear that. Cause again, I feel like it.
00:13:31
Speaker
When you have that awareness for your customers and you're able to show them that you're offering higher quality products with the same conveniences, like you said, they're more than willing to convert and they would rather support a local producer than not knowing where their food is coming from.
00:13:45
Speaker
Absolutely. I think most customers would definitely would rather support the local economy or the local farmer. It's just making it convenient and easy and accessible. Yeah, absolutely. Going back to pricing.
Importance of Financial Tracking
00:13:56
Speaker
So when we talked about knowing like your input costs and understanding your business numbers, but can you maybe dive into more of what you talked about the spreadsheet tracking and everything else? What other tools do you use to that process to understand your input costs versus your output costs, et cetera?
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, so I sit down with those kind of once a year, but it's definitely something that should be visited more often than that. So I've even sat down or made a couple of calls to our CPA this year who does our taxes to be like, Hey, can we quarterly just miss standing appointment? Let's put all this data in the spreadsheet. Am I staying on track?
00:14:29
Speaker
right now I have time to do is in the off season, which is winter years almost up and then be like, Oh crap, we overspent here, we underspent here or we're way over budget. So I want to sit down again with my CPA. It's one of those the best use of my time. I'm not an accountant. I don't want to be an accountant. I think numbers are interesting. Great. That's as far as it goes for me. So somebody that can be like, Hey, here's my books. Here's my QuickBooks file, which I keep up to date so that I can just send that information off.
00:14:51
Speaker
because she doesn't know what all our vendors are for, what products we get from what person and where that falls in different categories because I do want things categorized. I want to know maybe an enterprise is really draining and it's not holding its weight. Maybe that's something I consider dropping or that I really need to reevaluate how we're doing it. So I do have plans this coming year to sit down quarterly with my CPA and go over those
00:15:12
Speaker
during the year so we can make those adjustments before the end of the year. So I would say, yeah, finding a good CPA, hands down, best money we'll ever spend. When we were like a sole proprietorship, I could do my own taxes. It's pretty easy. Once we became an LLC in our other business as a corporation, that is way out of my game. Right. And laws and taxes and all those things are changing constantly. So to be a full-time farmer, full-time business owner, and then also to keep track of that's impossible.
00:15:38
Speaker
Yeah, it is. I'm not how I want to spend my time. A barn to door does have an integration with QuickBooks. So how does that play into your processes? Yeah. I mean, super easy because I really, our barn to door is like a single input. It's all sale product income. So it's easy to synchronize that it's already into my QuickBooks. I don't have to go synchronize it with my bank and my credit card. That would be another tool. If you've never used QuickBooks, I love QuickBooks. I know there's 10,000 other accounting softwares, but I think it's really easy. It integrates with a lot of different things because it's really popular and doing an online basics course of how to put those things in.
00:16:07
Speaker
how to add categories. Doing it one time makes it super simple for the rest of your business would definitely be like a huge point of advice. Numbers are scary and intimidating, but you need to know them because losing your business is also scary.
00:16:20
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. So having an audit and not being prepared, I think that's a big nightmare that we hear from. Yeah. Yeah. We had a payroll audit this year and I was like, ask my accountant, what did we do wrong? She said, I think you just like randomly got drawn. You did everything right. Just sent her your paperwork and you're okay. I'm like, okay, sweet. And you were prepared. It sounds like all the ducks were in a row and it was easy just to send it off and. Yes. Yeah. That's awesome. Like you said, having those tools in place, having the people surround you like CPAs, having that peace of mind is huge for your business.
00:16:50
Speaker
It's not cheap. It's an expense, but I think it's well worth the money to have a handle on things and to make those financially informed decisions, not just, Hey, I like pigs. Let's do more pigs. Are pigs making me money?
00:17:02
Speaker
Exactly. That's where it comes down to the bottom line for sure. And Barnstooler, we launched recently our finance course with a QuickBooks- Yeah, I love that. So I think that's a good way for farmers if they're looking to get started with QuickBooks and the Barnstooler integration. So what would be your advice to other farmers for determining the price of their products? I would also love to know how, does the way you package your products determine your prices? So like with your subscriptions and your boxes, et cetera.
00:17:30
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great point to hit on that I didn't kind of finish that thought when I started saying that we started pricing then on what our cost is. And our cost puts us, in my opinion, in the premium product category. And I want a premium price. I work really hard for my product, so I want to make money, a decent money on it. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And so not just pricing accordingly, but I need to also make sure my product looks, tastes, feels like what I'm charging for.
00:17:57
Speaker
If I do a giant $75 Tomahawk ribeye for Father's Day, that better be a dang good steak or nobody's going to buy it. They can't be freezer burnt. Packaging's got to be good. The flavor's great. Even the labeling has got to look like a premium product. Paying the little extra doesn't cost me three cents a label if I order 5,000 labels to stick on my packages because you can look at your state's regulations. You can put additional labeling most of the time on
00:18:20
Speaker
the meat you get back from the processor. I'm not covering up their label, so everything's still there, but just a branded sticker. So that package looks pretty. It looks cool. It looks like it's worth what I'm charging for it. And again, deliveries. I do those in insulated tote bags. There are costs for us. We reuse them. We tell customers to leave them out. We'll pick them up. I get 50% of them back probably. But again, it's got a nice pocket for a folder receipt. It's got our brand on it. Deliver it, drop right to the door. The neighbors see it. Again, it's that perceived value as well. So it needs to appear like
00:18:49
Speaker
it is the premium product it is as well. So I think that is really important in your pricing when you want to charge a premium is going that little extra step with the stickers with the clean papers with the insulated bags or whatever fits the model that you're doing.
00:19:01
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And you touched on so many great points there. I think one of the biggest things is just those branding opportunities to tie your brand into your packaging with your labels. And I love that idea of having those tote bags with your brand name on there and just the brand awareness alone that the neighbors are going to see and be jealous of, Oh, what did they get over there on their doorstep? And to increase that brand awareness locally among the neighbors is huge. I know we hear a lot of farmers picking up more customers in neighborhoods that way.
00:19:27
Speaker
Yeah. And we'll do like special commercial weekends at our in-person farmers market. Oh, free tote when you spend $30, which is not that much. It's not crazy. But then we see our insulated totes all year long walking around the market with our name on them too. It cost me maybe $3 a bag, but that marketing is free. So. Yeah, absolutely. And I think farmers too are sometimes afraid to charge those extra premium prices because they want their products to be accessible to everyone. So what advice would you say to those farmers who are afraid to maybe charge some of those higher prices?
00:19:55
Speaker
You've got to look at who your market is. Who are you marketing to? Who's your ideal customer? That's a whole other marketing thing. Sit down and if you were to paint a picture of that person, that one single person who's your ideal customer, what does he or she look like? What do they do for a living? What do they do in their spare time? Just have that person in mind and every time you're
00:20:13
Speaker
writing something, writing a recipe, a blog, an email, like you're writing it to that one person. And it's okay not to be everybody's product, you know, and that's fine. That's totally fine. And sometimes you might be that person's holiday product. We sell a lot of Thanksgiving turkeys to customers who don't buy from us year round. So just
00:20:29
Speaker
believing in the value of what you're selling as well and that you don't have to be competing with every single person around the corner or the backyard person who's got free dozens of eggs all the time. That's my competition. Those people are giving stuff away. I can't do anything about that. Controlling what you can control and really marketing to who your ideal customer is and catering to them in all the things that you do and that's going to draw more of that ideal customer to your door.
Engaging Customers via Email Marketing
00:20:54
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And then what are ways in which you're consistently engaging your customers too? They aren't subscribed to any of your products, but what are ways you try to get them to keep coming back to you? Emails for sure. So I'm a firm believer in email marketing. I love our mailship integration because the order reminders, that takes me three minutes because they're limited in characters. I dumb, not adding graphics. I don't feel like I've got to make it a pretty newsletter, but guaranteed makes me a couple hundred bucks every week just by sending those email reminders out.
00:21:18
Speaker
because sometimes they're ordering stuff that I'm not even putting in the reminder. It's just, oh, Evans, oh, I forgot to order my eggs this week. Or, oh, I forgot, I gotta put my deposit on my turkey. It's just the way to continually engaging with that customer. So I'm a firm believer in email marketing. I even pay like my girl that does our farmer's market stand on Saturdays since we opened our in-person store on-farm. I have not mastered the ability to be in two places at once.
00:21:41
Speaker
I say most of the time in our on-farm store, she does our in-person market and I started paying her a dollar per email. So every time she collects an email in person, because I want to maintain that year-round relationship even when our market doesn't year round. I tell her like, how many emails you get this week? How much you put in the system? Like I'll give her an extra five, 10 bucks.
00:21:58
Speaker
That doesn't cost me anything really. Email marketing, again, I think is the best way to personally communicate with your customer when you're not seeing them face to face. And if those five customers of those emails that you paid $1 for each go and sign up for a subscription even, think about all that recurring revenue you're just getting from that $1 email. So that's huge to have those incentives for employees. Yeah. Like even if they like buy a dozen eggs each, like that's 25 bucks. So what's my ROI? I spent five bucks. I got 25 bucks. Like it's pretty good. Yeah.
00:22:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. That's fabulous. I know we have the CFSA conference coming up in Durham, North Carolina. So excited to be in person again. I love my in-person conferences. Yes, we are so excited too. So for our listeners who are not in the Carolinas, CFSA is the Carolina Farms Stewardship Association and Jessica Evans and Barn to door are participating in this sustainable farming conference in Durham, North Carolina.
Educational Agritourism as a Strategy
00:22:50
Speaker
And so this episode will actually debut after the conference has wrapped, but I know that you will be presenting not only alongside Barnes-door, but you have your own presentation. So I would love to hear more about that.
00:23:01
Speaker
I do. So that's the former teacher in me. I love talking to groups of strangers. It's wonderful. My strand at the conference is actually on educational agritourism. So a couple of years back, we started a summer camp program for kids. And that's maybe not be everybody's cup of tea, but that's really what it's focused on is not only agritourism, so being able to use your farm to create your tourism dollar value and revenue, but the educational side of that too. So
00:23:23
Speaker
And that's what we're focused on how to do either summer camps or just even weekend camps, afternoon camps, things like that to add again, value and revenue for what we're doing. I love to hear that. And then also just focus on like educating the future consumer too is huge and turning those into consumers who are consuming locally produced products and supporting local businesses. That's awesome to hear that you guys are doing that and how fun of a presentation.
00:23:48
Speaker
Yeah, it'll be really fun. And we'll cover just a lot of things that come up when you start planning something big like that. And again, it's for us, it's a marketing thing. So I love doing the summer camps because it's a heck of a lot of work for sure. It is profitable, but it also gets people that maybe are in my surrounding community because people aren't going to drive from.
00:24:04
Speaker
two hours away to go to my summer camp. And I think it's wonderful, but let's be real. And so it's drawing my local community, letting them put foot on the farm, see, touch, feel, have that experience. And then it's not like an intimidating connection. Those are the people that come to our other events, the people that will shop at our store. So also it's a marketing strategy as well.
00:24:21
Speaker
and increasing that local brand awareness too, like we talked about before. That's awesome. And then Barnsterer's presentation is on food scarcity and how local farms can be a solution after the current climate of our economy. And so I know you will be participating in a panel discussion with us alongside two other Carolina farmers. So we're so excited to have you and to be with you there in person.
00:24:41
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited about that too. So just to wrap things up here, what's next at Evans Family Farm? All kinds of crazy as usual. Nothing terribly different probably for the coming year. We're going to keep doing our summer camp programs. We actually have randomly gotten a lot of requests. It sounds weird, but for an adult like farm camp.
00:24:58
Speaker
program, whether it's like a day program or a weekend program, just learning on-farm, on-hand skills, whether it's poultry processing or grass management, and then having the fun aspect in there too that gives them that personal connection. Let's cook some food, let's have some craft beer, and let's hang out and meet people that are like-minded. So probably start doing a little more of that in this coming year for sure, hopefully continuing what we're doing now, producing quality pasture raised meat.
00:25:23
Speaker
That sounds like a very fun endeavor. I can't wait to hear how that goes and get a debrief on next time we have you on the podcast. I want to extend my thanks to Jessica for joining us on this week's podcast episode here at Barn to Door. We're humbled to support thousands of farms across the country, including farms like Evans Family Farm.
00:25:40
Speaker
We're honored to get the opportunity to learn from our most successful farms who share the tactics, resources, and tools they use to grow and manage their farm business. If you would like to connect with Jessica and other farm advisors, attend Barn Store Connect. Register for weekly sessions at barnstore to connect.com. For more information on Evans Family Farm, you can follow them on Instagram at evansfamilyfarmnc. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next time.
00:26:09
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in. For more free farm resources, tips, and tactics that are most successful farms used to grow and manage their business, visit barnadore.com slash resources. Also don't forget to subscribe to the Direct Farm podcast to automatically download our weekly episodes. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.